Major completed changes:
- Packages can depend on npm modules
- Apps can contain packages in a directory called "packages"
- Tests are run with a new "meteor test-packages" subcommand
- All JS files are wrapped in closures (so top-level "var" is now file-local)
Additionally, there has been a major rehaul of the release process and how
installation and "meteor update" works. Apps can be pinned to particular
releases (though this is ignored if you're running Meteor from a git checkout)
and you may can have multiple releases installed in parallel. The bulk of
Meteor's code is installed in your home directory at ~/.meteor/ instead of
globally. Some aspects of this are not yet finalized (and will be before the
next release), but all aspects relating to running Meteor from a checkout should
work.

Avoiding a catch and rethrow may increase the likelihood of getting the right stack trace (the original one) across browsers. In old IE (6 or 7 I think), a simple try/finally would cause the original stack trace to be lost. Chrome had a bug in the last couple years where a rethrown exception would have the correct e.stack but show up with the wrong trace in the console if uncaught: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=60240 . (Old IE doesn't have e.stack, but it shows the line number if the error is uncaught.)

So it's partly superstitious, but basically I try not to catch and rethrow the same exception if possible.

Blessing is now the time that bootstrap tarballs are created.
There's a banner that goes into the global manifest (stored in
scripts/admin/banner.txt).
The global manifest.json is now entirely generated: there's no record of the
current version stored in git.
Have not yet updated launch-meteor or install-template.sh or the fake release
for this brave new bootstrap world, or https://install-bootstrap.meteor.com/.

New node (0.8.21+) throws an error when path.join is passed null. Connect 1.9.2's static.send (used by gzippo) does this if you don't pass a 'root' option. Passing root: '/' works around this, but we should consider fixing the underlying issue, possibly by upgrading connect.